Online Internet Marketing Strategies 101

 

By: Matt Bacak

Online internet marketing strategies includes two different strategies: in-bound marketing (marketing strategies used to get customers to come to your website) and out-bound marketing (marketing out to customers). Out-bound marketing includes activities such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or buying ad space on other sites and will be covered at a later time.

What is a marketing strategy?

In-bound online marketing strategies include providing valuable content to motivate potential customers to visit your website and ultimately buy your product. By contributing valuable content using web 2.0 marketing such as social media websites, article directories and video submission services potential customers will visit your website because they are interested in your products or services.

The following market strategy explains the process:

1. Identify your target audience. Inexperienced internet marketers fail at marketing because they try to market to everyone. The problem with this type of marketing is that it doesn’t attract serious buyers just tire kickers. If you want to be successful in online marketing, you need to market to a target market. Who is your target market? It’s a specific group of people you’ve identified by asking such questions as: What are their demographics? What do they do in the spare time? What are their interests or hobbies? For example, if you discover your target audience is women between the ages of 25 to 34 who spend a lot of time on Facebook and love sports, you can develop a business strategy to motivate this specific group to want to learn more.

2. Determine your purpose.  In order to develop the right message you need to determine your call to action; in other words, what do you want your target audience to do? If your purpose is to generate leads, then offer something of value for free by placing an opt-in above the fold. If your purpose is to sell them something, then write dynamic sales copy listing the most important benefits and place the order form at the end of your sales copy. As you can see, each one of these business strategies has a different strategy.

3.  Spend time on keyword research. Finding the right keywords for your campaign is one of the most important online marketing strategies. Start by thinking like a potential customer – what words (or phrase) would they use to search for your product or service? Aim for 3 to 5 keywords with each keyword containing 2 or more words. Keywords like “insurance” or “mortgage” are competitive and will be difficult to rank for. A keyword phrase like “long term care insurance Albany New York” is less competitive and will be easier to rank in the search engines. Assign a different group of keywords for each page of content you create.

4.  Create multiple pages or posts. A few internet marketers create a few pages for their website or write a handful of posts to their blog and then wonder why traffic to their site is non-existent. Although your objective with a market plan is to attract visitors (and potential customers), you have no way of predicting which page or post will bring the most visitors or convert into buying customers. The solution is to create as many pages and posts as possible with the intent that some of them will successfully bring visitors to your site. The same advice goes for video – the more videos you produce the better your chances of having one of them go viral.

5. Be social. Once you’ve determined where your target audience hangs out, integrate your videos or blog posts on the social networking sites where your target audience frequents. Your goal is to get visitors back to your website, so encourage people to like your Facebook fan page (some rules apply), retweet your pitch, or pin it on Pinterest.

Finally, be sure to track your results. There are a number of tools available that can show you what online marketing strategies worked and which ones didn’t. Get rid of the strategies that don’t work and duplicate the ones that do.